For nine centuries, the dominant Sunni theology held that reason cannot contradict scripture. If it seemed to, you had misread the text.
That is the Ashʿarite position, dominant in Sunni Islam from roughly the 10th to the 18th century. Not a vague openness to philosophy, but a method: when a verse seems to clash with reason, you look for the reading that restores coherence, because truth cannot contradict itself.
A rival school, Atharism, rejected that move from the start: take the text as it stands, no rational detour, even against intuition (the classic formula being bilā kayf, "without how"). Long marginal, it became dominant across much of the Muslim world in the modern period, a shift driven less by argument than by the resources that funded its spread after 1973.
What interests me is less who is right than the methodological fracture itself: where do you start to know God, with reason, with the text, or with the fiṭra? And the circularity problem that, on closer look, neither school escapes.
I wrote a longer piece tracing this history, including the Al-Azhar case (founded Fatimid/Ismaili in 970, only Ashʿarite-Sunni after Saladin in 1171):